Josiah Cohen

(Photo credit belongs entirely to Tyska on X. Great work.)

The Golden State Valkyries debuted at Chase Center with much fanfare in their first of two preseason games, falling by just a point to the Los Angeles Sparks in an exciting affair. No one will remember the result: this one was all about celebrating the beginning of the WNBA’s 13th team.

For the coaches, the fact that no one will remember the result is ideal, not that it was such an awful one. Coaches are all about process, whereas fans (and organizations as a whole) are all about results, so the opportunity to have a pure process game is optimal for the staff. I want to look at a few process points—pace, three-point shooting, and shot location—from the Valkyries’ first game to see what head coach Natalie Nakase might be looking for out of her team this year. 

Pace

Nakase has been all about pace, as her postgame interview, the game broadcast, and other media coverage has shown. 

The same theme carries across the starter and bench lineups depicted in these two clips. Tiffany Hayes, who was the Valks’ best player getting downhill in the game, pushes off a miss with Sparks rim protector Azura Stevens lagging a bit behind; later, Carla Leite pushes downhill again off a miss with no rim protector in front of her. 

In Nakase’s three years in Las Vegas as an assistant coach, the Aces ranked 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in pace from 2022 to 2024. It’s generally a basketball trend that works, as this extremely simplistic graph shows: teams are more effective on offense when they can (“can” does not always mean “should”) run.

(I wrote a function to scrape this from Basketball-Reference; credit to them, any errors surely mine.)

The Valks ran a lot off misses, but didn’t push the ball much off makes, which is a different level of pushing the pace. We’ll see if they start doing that in game two.

Three-Point Shooting

In my roster overview from earlier this week, I mentioned that I expected a few veterans to up their three-point rate (threes attempted as a percentage of total field goals) this season with the Valks. While it doesn’t mean anything, the fact that Golden State has a three-point culture combines nicely with the Aces’ three-point rate rankings with Nakase: 3rd, 2nd, 4th in the WNBA.

For probably the last time, in what can only be chalked up to variance, I may have been proven right. The Valkyries had a three-point rate of 42.4%, which would have ranked first in the league last season, despite shooting just 21.4% from beyond the arc. Now, it’s just preseason, and the Sparks themselves had a 41.4% three rate, but three-point rate is something coaches can really affect, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the Valks were at the forefront of an increased three-point shooting effort across the league.

Here’s an example of what I mean about veterans upping their three-point rate. Temi Fagbénlé has 18 career three-point attempts. Last night, she took 2, at a per-40-minute rate of 4.08 (she played a little under 20 minutes), which is in stark contrast to her career per-40 rate of 0.7 (per HerHoopStats). 

Three-Point Location

Another player who shot threes at a higher rate was Monique Billings, and hers are really instructive, I think, of not just what Golden State wants to shoot but from where they want to shoot.

In just 18+ minutes in the first preseason game, Billings averaged ~4.25 3PA per 40 mins, compared to 0.2 per 40 for her career. Her first three—the first three in GSV preseason history—is instructive, I think, of what the Valkyries are looking for: corner threes. 

Nakase’s Aces (and GM Ohemaa Nyanin’s title-winning New York Liberty) shot corner threes at a higher rate than anybody else in the league last season. Per data from WNBA.com, the league as a whole shot 35.2% from the corner last season, 1.4% higher than the 33.8% mark on threes from above the break. 

That may not sound like a lot, but it adds up over the course of the season. The average WNBA team took 914 threes last season. All else being equal (remember, this is a very simplified example), had all those been from the corner as opposed to all being from above the break, that average team would have scored 38 points more last season. If you don’t think coaches want even that small increase, think again.

A lot of these come naturally. Once the Valkyries got their drive-and-kick game going, they flourished, consistently making extra passes to the corner and getting good looks from that spot. These shots are the culmination of offensive philosophy that values spacing and corner three-point shooting. 

I hand-tracked the above-the-break/corner split and came up with a 19-9 split, meaning that 32% of GSV’s threes were from the corner. The Sparks’ split was 23-6, i.e. 21% for the corner. The league average last year was 13% from the corner. That’s the sort of math the Valkyries like to have on their side.

In fact, I’ll provide a clip that I think brings some evidence for my claim.

Laeticia Amihere had a big fourth quarter, leading the Valkyries in scoring, and shot four threes, three more than her career total, to this point, of one single attempt. Look at her cut backdoor in the above clip, resulting in a TO—but more importantly, look at Carla Leite and Fagbénlé (who was excellent overall) tell her to space out to the corner after the turnover! That’s putting philosophy into action.  

The Valkyries don’t have a big-name scorer on the team, so putting players in the best position to succeed, by math and by talent, is critical to the coaching staff’s effect on this season. Playing Golden State basketball—fast, long-range, and smart—is just the ticket, and the early signs from preseason show that that’s what the Valkyries are planning to do.

Extra Notes

Kate Martin has a green light, and she’ll get minutes with weak point-of-attack defender depth at guard behind Veronica Burton… GSV ran a ton of empty PnR with three-point spacing on the weak side… the depth guards got killed on perimeter screens and cross-screens in the paint… seems like they wanted to push Kelsey Plum to her left (drive), and take her out of her shot going right… I have no idea who wins the backup big spot.